IAM139- ​CEO​ ​and​ ​Co-founder Creates a Community to Improve the Workplace for Women

Georgene Huang is obsessed with improving the workplace for women. She’s the CEO and Co-founder of Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women to discover the hard-to-find intel on work-life balance, salary, maternity leave policies, and how companies treat women. Previously she ran the enterprise business at Dow Jones and was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures. She is a graduate of Cornell and Stanford Universities.

• CEO Hack: Being critical on how I spend my time and energy
• CEO Nugget: Having conversations with other founders who have done it before me
• CEO Defined: Getting the best out of your team

Website: https://fairygodboss.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Fairygodboss/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fairygodboss
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fairygodboss/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/fairygodboss/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:27

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Georgene Huang, of Fairygodboss. Georgene, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Georgene​ ​Huang 0:36

It's great to be with you.

Gresham Harkless 0:37

I appreciate you for taking some time out and what I wanted to do was read a little bit more about Georgene so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And your dream is obsessed with improving the workplace for women.

She’s the CEO and Co-founder of Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women to discover the hard-to-find intel on work-life balance, salary, maternity leave policies, and how companies treat women. Previously she ran the enterprise business at Dow Jones and was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures. She is a graduate of Cornell and Stanford Universities. Georgene, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Georgene​ ​Huang 1:12

Yes, I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:13

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So the first question I had was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story. And what led you to start your business?

Georgene​ ​Huang 1:19

Well, Gresham, about three and a half years ago, I was running a big business unit one day, I like to say I had a bad to hit work. So Paragon boss was born out of an experience I had well, job searching, I was pregnant two months and not showing and I happened to be laid off during a management shake-up at my company. So my boss was fired. And this had nothing to do with my pregnancy. But it put me in an awkward situation. As you can imagine, I was going on the job market wanting to find out things about companies, maternity policies, and whether there were Executive Women in management positions.

And I just didn't feel like I could talk about any of these things. So fairy god boss is a place meant to help women who are struggling with getting inside intel about what it's really like to work somewhere from other women directly.

Gresham Harkless 2:05

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, I am obviously sorry to hear that you had to go through all of that. But I always say sometimes it's darkest before dawn. So sometimes those bad things happen, but good things come about from them. And it seems like through your process, looking for all those kinds of nuances for a job and all those kinds of criteria that you were taking into account, you couldn't find it. So you decided to create an interior entrepreneurial form.

Georgene​ ​Huang 2:25

That's right. And I think having that experience was my aha moment that women do experience career decisions and issues differently than men at different points in their life.

Gresham Harkless 2:35

That makes perfect sense. And I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper to hear a little bit more about what you can do on Fairygodboss, what kind of information you have there, and a little bit more about how it's serving the clients.

Georgene​ ​Huang 2:46

Sure. So we're free for women and what women do on our site. A long time ago, all we had was just geography. So we asked women in our community 15 different questions ranging from their salary range, their title, their department, whether they think women and men are treated equally at their companies, do they take maternity leave. How flexible is our company? And these questions are the ones that women in our community want to hear about.

So we used to only be able to do that. But since we have grown, we now reach over two and a half million women a month on the site. Women are having conversations on the site with each other. And it's not always about their specific job. But it might be something like should I change my last name? I've been using it professionally is that to get married. Or it might be about something in the political news sphere, there was an active conversation about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, for example without going on. So these conversations have become sort of the lifeblood of the community and are helping us become a weekly daily habit for women, even when they're not looking for jobs.

Gresham Harkless 3:48

That makes perfect sense and is funny, like a lot of times we solve one problem, and then all of a sudden, all these other kinds of I guess I shouldn't say problems, but things you can help support end up coming about.

Georgene​ ​Huang 3:58

Yeah, and I would say that we're the largest community. And so jobs are always going to be at the forefront of what we do. But there's so much that happens between person job search, which typically now happens every two years.

Gresham Harkless 4:11

That makes perfect sense. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be what you feel kind of distinguishes you or your organization or the kind of sets you apart.

Georgene​ ​Huang 4:19

Well, I would say that if you think about the career communities out there, LinkedIn probably comes to mind. And what LinkedIn is essentially doing is a great company, but it's putting your face next to your resume. This means that while it's great to research who people are and understand who you're connected to, what it's really bad at doing is helping you have authentic, conversations around things that you might feel less than 100%. Secure about, you're supposed to be the best version of yourself.

And so the way we bring companies and jobs to light is by going into the personal stuff that you wouldn't necessarily put right next to your resume and fix stuff about, you know how you manage your day. In terms of work-life balance, how you rose through the ranks, and a more storytelling basis, these are the things that I think attract women to the site and also help us convince employers where a b2b enterprise sales revenue business model, can, it helps convince our customers to partner with us because it's hard to find a place to tell your story through these sort of personal means.

Gresham Harkless 5:23

That makes perfect sense. Awesome. And now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app or book or habit that you have. But it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Georgene​ ​Huang 5:35

Well, we are a venture-funded startup. And that means that we're growing and changing very rapidly. So for me to constantly get better means that whatever got me here, probably means is not going to be enough to get into the next milestone. So that's hard to do. And I often have to force myself to stop and be critical about how I'm spending my time, my energy.

Gresham Harkless 5:58

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I'll oftentimes just say, you know, wherever your next step, you have to give up your previous step or your or your future business, where you end up growing your business to you have to give up some of the things so it kind of sounds like you go through that same process when you're thinking about growing your business.

Georgene​ ​Huang 6:12

Yeah, I say every six months, I consider myself having a new job because the company is so different from earlier.

Gresham Harkless 6:18

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or something, you can tell your younger business self.

Georgene​ ​Huang 6:27

I would say that the most helpful people in my journey as a CEO, or other founders and CEOs who've done it before me and are a little bit ahead of the curve. So I don't mean somebody who is maybe 20 years ahead, but literally a year, year and a half ahead of where my business is, those are the people and the conversations that have been the most eye-opening and helpful.

Gresham Harkless 6:48

Awesome, that makes perfect sense. I always say success leaves clues. So a lot of times you can, you know, pay attention to those people that have done, what you're hoping to do and have accomplished that. And you can kind of learn a lot from them, and you can implement it into your overall activities and your business.

Georgene​ ​Huang 7:02

Right.

Gresham Harkless 7:03

And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So Georgene, wanted to ask you what being a CEO means to you.

Georgene​ ​Huang 7:14

It means first and foremost, being aware of how to get the best out of my people, no person, especially a CEO can do it all. And therefore it's about leveraging the people that you collected around you, and your team, and making sure that you're giving them what they need to be successful.

Gresham Harkless 7:33

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule, Georgene, what I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and our listeners and then of course how to find out more about Fairygodboss and getting get in touch with you.

Georgene​ ​Huang 7:47

I would just say that our social mission is to improve the workplace for women. And we do that with every single woman that joins our community. So anyone who wants to partner because they have women in their lives or women in their organizations, their customer base or user base should be easy to find on the internet with a unique name.

Gresham Harkless 8:0

There you go. Yeah, and just in case it's a little bit too difficult. We'll have all the links in the show notes just so they can follow up with you. Awesome, but I appreciate you again. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 8:16

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co

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